For the last weeks I have been building a game about a queue.

That sounds small, but the queue is the point. The Strait of Hormuz is usually presented as a map, a percentage, a geopolitical phrase that appears in a headline and then disappears from the body. One fifth of the world’s seaborne oil passes through it. Fertilizer, LNG, food, military escorts, insurance risk, fuel prices, diplomatic pressure - everything narrows into a strip of water that most people can point to and still not really feel.

When a chokepoint closes, the story becomes too large to hold. It moves through shipping markets, fuel stations, kitchens, ports, hospitals, ministries, and news alerts. The article explains it. The chart clarifies it. The map locates it. Then the tab closes, and the scale slips away.

I wanted to try a different container.

The result is BOTTLENECK, a free browser newsgame about the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis. You play a maritime coordinator with three transit slots per day for ten days, while two thousand ships are waiting outside the chokepoint. Each day you decide what gets through: oil tankers, food bulkers, LNG carriers, fertilizer ships, container vessels, military escorts. Every slot is a triage decision. Every decision moves pressure somewhere else.

Block oil and fuel queues form in Mumbai. Prioritize food and Japan loses LNG. Authorize a military escort and Tehran’s trust collapses. None of these decisions are clean. That was the design brief from the beginning: do not make the crisis look solvable just because the interface needs a button.

Three transit slots a day. Two thousand ships waiting.

PLAY BOTTLENECK

WATCH THE TRAILER

51 seconds. The chokepoint. The cascade. The triage.

SEE THE SYSTEM MOVE

Five minutes of desktop gameplay from the crisis desk.

WHY I MADE IT AS A GAME

Some journalism loses force when it remains only explanation. We can describe the Hormuz crisis in all the correct ways. We can publish timelines, maps, charts, quotes from officials, shipping analysis, oil market reactions, humanitarian warnings. All of that work matters. BOTTLENECK depends on it completely.

But reading about a queue is different from being responsible for one.

That difference is what interested me. I did not want to make a game about Iran as a villain, or a fantasy of command, or a geopolitical toy. I wanted to make the queue tangible. I wanted the player to feel the repeated pressure of a limited system: three slots, too many ships, no innocent answer. The game does not ask whether you are smart enough to solve the crisis. It asks what kind of damage you choose when every option has a cost.

This is where the format matters. A newsgame can do something an article cannot do as easily: it can make structure felt. It can turn abstraction into a repeated action. It can make the player understand that the problem is not a lack of information, but the collision of incompatible needs under pressure.

WHAT IS INSIDE BOTTLENECK

The game is built on verified reporting: 125+ linked sources, real maritime transit data, 40 modeled ships, and five forces reacting to every decision - Tehran, Washington, the shipping industry, affected populations, and your own credibility. The cascade system is not decoration. It is the journalism layer translated into mechanics.

At the end of the game, your decisions are compared with the real-world collapse in daily transits through the Strait of Hormuz. The point is not to win. The point is to understand what kind of problem this is, and why the word “chokepoint” is not just a metaphor. It is a physical condition with political, economic, and human consequences.

BOTTLENECK takes 15-20 minutes to play. It runs in a browser. It is available in English, Polish, and Spanish. It is free, ad-free, independent, and built as part of my broader practice of Artistic Journalism: rigorous reportage given physical, spatial, interactive, or performative form.

I keep returning to the same question in my work: what other containers can reporting live inside? Sometimes the answer is a stage. Sometimes it is an exhibition. Sometimes it is a wall in the city. This time it is a browser game.

THE POINT IS NOT
TO PRODUCE MORE MEDIA.

IT IS TO CREATE WORK THAT CUTS THROUGH NUMBNESS

This post is the launch announcement. The deeper case study of how I built BOTTLENECK will live separately, because that is a different story: production process, AI collaboration, structure, speed, mistakes, and what changed in the work because of it.

For now, I would rather you play the thing first.

PLAY

In journalism, context is not background. It is what makes the story. It determines what matters, what is noise, and what can be said with authority.

The reader’s context - the baseline you are writing into - is the minimum understanding you need before a single line gets filed. Send a reporter somewhere they do not understand, and you get a press release. Send them in carrying years of reading, sources, maps, transcripts, and prior coverage, and they return with something no one else can produce.

That same rule now governs how AI actually performs.

CHAT HAS NO MEMORY

Most newsrooms still treat AI like a day-one intern. Assign a task. Provide minimal briefing. Hope for a usable draft. That is chat. Chat has no memory. Every new window is a blank room. No history, no accumulation, no edge.

The constraint is not the model. It is context. Which is just another word for memory.

“The constraint is not the model. It is context. Which is just another word for memory.”

I CHANGED THE ARCHITECTURE

I spent a year working the wrong layer - following the industry’s shallow adoption curve. Polishing sentences. Drafting summaries. Translating copy. None of it compounded. Pro plans cap attachments. Gems hold a handful of files. Close the tab and the system forgets who you are.

So I changed the architecture.

I stopped paying for tools that did not accumulate knowledge. I stopped treating AI as a conversational interface. I started building a memory layer.

Over several months, I indexed a 3TB archive of journalism research: investigations, campaigns, case studies, newsgames, immersive formats. That archive now sits behind every task I run. Prompts stay short because the context is already in the room. The system does not guess. It retrieves.

STANDARDS ARE CATCHING UP

Google’s Stitch now reads DESIGN.md - an emerging open spec for encoding brand systems I had already written mine. The moment Stitch could parse it, it stopped being a demo and started generating whole interfaces in my brand, without me opening Figma.

From the opposite direction, Claude Cowork collapses the boundary between tool and workspace. Instead of exporting context into prompts, the agent operates inside your filesystem - reading folder-level instructions, connecting to Notion, Slack, Drive, working inside your context instead of asking you to paste it into a chat every time.

DESIGN.md pushes context out. Cowork pulls the agent in. Either direction, the principle is the same. The memory layer wins.

“DESIGN.md pushes context out. Cowork pulls the agent in. The memory layer wins.”

ONE PERSON, STUDIO OUTPUT

With that in place, one person can do the work of a studio. Projects that used to queue behind design and code cycles now ship the same day. This week I will publish a newsgame built in under 20 hours - on top of a memory of 150+ games I had already studied. The production was fast because the thinking was already done.

HOURS ON EXECUTION.
MONTHS ON MEMORY.

THE NEW UNIT ECONOMICS OF A SINGLE REPORTER

THE MISSING LAYER

What is missing from most newsroom conversations is this layer. Industry reports still frame AI as transcription, summarisation, content placement. Useful. Not transformative. They document usage, not capability.

The sequence that works is structural. Foundation first. Memory and context. Skills and routines. Then the work on top. Not the other way around.

FROM ORNAMENT TO MOAT

Once the foundation is solid, you stop competing on work every model can now generate, and start doing what no model can. Work grounded in a specific, accumulated, opinionated context. Journalism with a body. Journalism with a room. Journalism that carries a signature the system can assist but not replicate.

That is where artistic journalism moves - from ornament to moat.

The real question is not what model you are using. It is what memory you are building - and how your stack lets it compound.

A few months ago Greg Piechota from INMA handed me a task that sounded small. Spend some time looking at how news brands market themselves. Campaigns, slogans, advertisements. See if anything interesting comes out of it.

I thought I would spend a weekend watching slick videos and admiring JPEGs.

Then I started counting.

By the time I finished, I had reviewed more than 4,000 brand campaigns from INMA’s Best Practices archive - one of the largest commercial libraries of journalism marketing on the planet. I went further back too, to the earliest newspaper advertisements in the late 19th century, 130 years of press history condensed into a single spreadsheet. I looked at how broadcasters branded themselves in the 1950s, how cable disrupted that, how the web shattered it, and how today’s publishers are scrambling to rebuild whatever is left.

The first thing I noticed was not any individual campaign.

It was a texture. An acoustic. A kind of hum across the whole archive.

If you strip out the logos, almost all modern journalism marketing is saying the same four things. Truth. Objective. Independent. Trust.

Try this yourself. Walk into a bar tonight. Tell three people you are launching a media outlet. Ask them to sketch the tagline on a napkin. I will bet you every time that two of those four words show up - regardless of political leaning, country, or format.

This is what I call the Sea of Sameness.

And it is not just an aesthetic problem. It is a commercial and civic problem. In an era where AI can generate any of those claims in seconds, at any scale, in any language, the identical positioning of almost every serious news outlet is no longer a quirk of the industry. It is an existential vulnerability.

HOW TRUST BECAME A SLOGAN

For most of journalism’s modern history, trust was infrastructure. You bought the local paper because it was the local paper. Locality was credibility. You did not pick between sources. You picked the one that existed. Trust was invisible, granted, assumed.

Then broadcast arrived and added a face. The anchor became the trust provider. The first true journalism influencers - Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley - were not selling a brand. They were the brand. Cable fractured that, first commercially, then ideologically. The web finished the job. Algorithms took over the distribution. Platforms took over the surfaces. Outlets that once reached readers through physical proximity now had to fight for attention alongside teenagers with ring lights.

This is where the marketing begins in earnest. When trust stops being infrastructure, it has to be advertised. And once you advertise it, you commoditize it.

“Announcing trust is like a dentist running a poster campaign that says: I am a dentist. I use dental tools.”

Skim through the INMA archive and you see newsrooms reaching for the same rhetorical lifebuoy over and over. We are trusted. We are independent. We tell the truth. These are not unique positions. They are the baseline of the job description.

Worse than unoriginal, it is structurally weak. The moment every outlet insists on the same four virtues, those virtues dissolve into noise. They become the white-noise machine of legacy journalism - reassuring to those already inside, invisible to everyone else.

You can see the failure in the numbers. News avoidance in Poland, where I live, sits at 44% - and people will tell you to your face that they avoid news on purpose. Similar numbers reappear across Europe. The outlets’ response? More trust slogans. Louder truth claims. Bigger fonts.

The Sea of Sameness is not a marketing inefficiency. It is a distribution crisis dressed up as a values statement.

WHAT AI DOES TO THIS PICTURE

Here is the thing people in my industry are still not fully digesting.

AI does not threaten journalism by getting facts wrong. AI threatens journalism by getting generic facts right, faster than any human, in whatever register you want. It can produce a plausible version of a news article. It can generate a credible brand video. It can imitate the editorial tone of any major outlet with surprising accuracy. It can certainly string together the word truth, the word independent, and the word trust into a shiny fifteen-second spot.

Every piece of journalism marketing built on generic trust claims is now, by definition, something a machine can do more cheaply.

“AI is not collapsing newsrooms because it is smart. It is collapsing them because it has finally priced the generic fairly - at zero.”

The outlets that survive the next decade will not be the ones that claim trust louder. They will be the outlets that can offer something a machine structurally cannot produce. Something physical. Something embodied. Something with a body behind it.

In other words: the end of the Sea of Sameness is not a better tagline.

It is a different kind of work.

FIVE WAYS OUT OF THE SEA

In the INMA archive, a small number of campaigns genuinely stand out. When I broke them down, I found five strategies that actually work - not because they are clever, but because they each do something the sameness cannot.

The first is cinematic truth. The New York Times’ The Truth Is Worth It reframed subscription as civic investment, dramatising the sacrifice behind reporting. The Washington Post’s Democracy Dies in Darkness, timed to Super Bowl and narrated by Tom Hanks, turned civic duty into a rallying cry. The Guardian’s 1986 Points of View - still one of the most elegant arguments for journalism ever made - shows how a single event looks different from three angles. These campaigns work because they stop selling the product and start showing what it costs to produce.

The second is ego-driven pricing. The Economist’s I never read The Economist. Management trainee, aged 42. Bloomberg’s Context changes everything. The FT’s framing of the cost of not knowing. These brands do not sell you news. They sell you a status upgrade. Their subscribers are not buying information. They are buying themselves.

The third is innovation as product. Helsingin Sanomat built an anti-censorship Counter-Strike map at the start of the war in Ukraine, and a font that melts as global temperatures rise. Reporters Without Borders put an uncensorable library inside Minecraft, a game that no dictatorship has yet managed to block. None of this is a slogan. It is a signal: we are alive. We will experiment. We will not flinch.

The fourth is emotional experience. The Guardian’s Hope Is Power reframed news as something that enables transformation instead of documenting decline. The Philadelphia Inquirer, rather than ask people to subscribe, built Unsubscribe from hate, unsubscribe from noise, unsubscribe from apathy. Subscribe to Philly. Two letters, and the whole register shifts.

The fifth is the shift from mission to conversion. The oldest rhetorical move in the set. The Guardian’s Not for Sale took the Scott Trust ownership structure and turned it into a membership argument. You are not buying news. You are funding a structure that cannot be bought.

“From nouns to verbs. From product to process. From possession to action.”

Each of these campaigns refuses a specific default. Each trades possession for process. Each goes from we have the truth to here is what we risk, what we build, what we stand for.

THE DEAD ZONE AT THE PAYWALL

There is one more thing I noticed while working through the archive, and it annoys me more than I expected.

The top of the funnel in most news marketing is carefully crafted. Real agencies. Real budgets. Real storytelling. Then you reach the paywall - and every outlet collapses into the same dead prompt. Seven days. Thirty days. 99 cents. Cancel anytime.

The civic register that was doing so much work a second ago disappears. No ebook. No welcome ritual. No thank you for crossing this threshold. My dentist gives me a sticker. My news outlet gives me a silent invoice.

If you believe the marketing, you are about to join a civilisational defence of democracy. If you look at the paywall, you are apparently entering a SaaS trial.

This is the Sea of Sameness in its most operational form. Top of funnel: mission. Bottom of funnel: silence. The exact moment a reader signals commitment, the brand goes mute. It is not a conversion problem. It is a rhetorical betrayal.

WHAT ARTISTIC JOURNALISM ACTUALLY IS

I do a specific kind of work for a living. I call it Artistic Journalism.

Most people hear that phrase and assume it means pretty journalism or journalism with design. That is not what it means. Artistic Journalism is a practice that integrates rigorous factual reporting with deliberate aesthetic presentation across sensory forms - a stage, an exhibition, a room, a spatial audio piece, a live magazine. The facts do not soften. The aesthetic does not decorate. They are the same operation.

The academic literature has been circling this territory for years. Stijn Postema’s work on journalism as artistic practice maps the emerging continuum between arts and reportage. Marcel Broersma, two decades ago, already argued that journalism is fundamentally performative - that reporting is a communicative act of persuasion, not a neutral mirror of the world. Joe Atkinson, writing about television newsrooms, pointed out that journalistic “performance” is never just ethical - it is also commercial and theatrical, whether the newsroom admits it or not.

What I have been building - Reakcja on stage in Warsaw, the View From Somewhere exhibition that toured INMA Toronto, the Newspaper Mural turning a wall into a living publication, the new Portal installation launching this summer - is the same road, paved differently.

A MACHINE CAN DRAFT
A NEWSLETTER.
IT CANNOT HOLD A ROOM.

THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT FOR PHYSICAL PRESENCE

The point is not spectacle. The point is that the reporting arrives with a body, in a room, under a spotlight, where it has to mean something to the people physically present. Journalism on stage. Journalism as architecture. Journalism as ritual. Journalism that asks for an audience’s time, not their eyeballs.

Nothing about this bypasses reporting rigour. The researcher is a researcher. The sources are sources. The facts remain facts. What changes is the container. And the container, it turns out, is where trust gets rebuilt.

This is also - and this is the part that matters for publishers - the single thing AI cannot touch.

In the age of synthetic media, physical presence, emotional risk, and shared attention become premium cultural values. That is not a mood. That is an economic argument.

BRANDING IS A BY-PRODUCT OF THE WORK

This is where artistic journalism and media branding fold into the same conversation.

Publishers keep asking how to stand out. The answer most agencies give is a campaign, a refresh, a new palette, a manifesto film. I have looked at 4,000 of those. Most of them are good. Very few of them change anything durable.

What does change things is when the work itself is different enough that the branding writes itself.

The Guardian’s ownership structure became the Not for Sale campaign. Helsingin Sanomat’s anti-censorship stunts are the brand. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Unsubscribe from hate campaign is less a slogan than an operating principle rendered visible. Reakcja’s brand is the room. Portal’s brand is a wall on a specific street in Warsaw.

Branding journalism is the argument that opens the room. Artistic journalism is what happens inside it. You cannot separate them without losing both.

The outlets that survive AI will not do so because they shouted trust more loudly. They will survive because they built something - physical, live, spatial, bodied - that you cannot write a prompt for. Branding will follow. It has no choice.

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER WILL DO

This is the first essay of a newsletter that will run twice a month. I want to be honest about what it is.

It is written from Warsaw. It is written by someone who has spent the last ten years co-founding and running Outriders, an award-winning journalism collective, and who is now entering a different chapter - working independently, building special projects for publishers and cultural institutions, developing a formal methodology for Artistic Journalism, and continuing to research how journalism has marketed itself across more than a century of press history.

I will not write clickbait. I will not write corporate abstractions. I will not tell you that AI is unlocking anything. And I will not pretend that the answer to journalism’s trust crisis is another dashboard.

If you are a publisher, editor, cultural producer, or journalist trying to figure out what can still work in a feed full of synthetic everything - this newsletter is for you. If you are a reader who wants to understand why your news outlet feels strangely flat these days, this is also for you.

Journalism does not need more content. It does not need more trust slogans.

It needs forms that make the reporting feel like it landed inside a human life.

That is the work.

This newsletter is where I will argue for it.